The modern communications era has brought about a tremendous expansion of wireline and wireless networks. Computer networks, television networks, and telephony networks are experiencing an unprecedented technological expansion, fueled by consumer demand. Wireless and mobile networking technologies have addressed related consumer demands, while providing more flexibility and immediacy of information transfer.
Current and future networking technologies continue to facilitate ease of information transfer and convenience to users. Due to the now ubiquitous nature of electronic communication devices, people of all ages and education levels are utilizing electronic devices to communicate with other individuals or contacts, receive services and/or share information, media and other content. One area in which there is a demand to increase ease of information transfer relates to the delivery of services to communication devices. The services may be in the form of applications that provide audio features. Some of the audio features of the applications may be provided by microphones of a communication device.
At present, the positions of the microphones in a communication device such as a mobile device may be limited which may create problems in achieving optimal audio output. Currently, some existing solutions address these problems by utilizing beamforming technology to produce beams to facilitate directional audio capture.
The directional beam quality may be determined by the number and locations of the microphones of a communication device used to construct the beams. However, the possible microphone positions may be limited, for example, in a mobile device. As such, the microphones may not necessarily be placed to achieve optimal beamforming. As one example, in a mobile device such as a mobile phone or a tablet computer, one side of the mobile device may be mostly covered by a screen, where microphones may be unable to be placed.
Furthermore, the microphones are usually placed to optimize the functioning of other applications. For example, in a mobile phone there may be a microphone for telephony usage, another microphone for active noise cancellation, and another microphone for audio capture related to video recording. The distance between these microphones may be too large for the conventional beamforming approach since the aliasing effect may take place in an instance in which the distance of the microphones is larger than half the wavelength of sound. This may limit the frequency band of operation for a beamformer. For example, in an instance in which there are two microphones that are located in the opposite ends of the mobile phone, their mutual distance may be several centimeters. This may limit the beamformer usage to low frequencies (for example, for a microphone distance of 10 centimeters (cm), the theoretical limit of the beamformer usage is less than 1.7 kilo hertz (kHz) in the frequency domain). As such, at present, the positions of microphones in communication devices may be too far apart which may cause problems in forming beams to achieve optimal audio.